I think that kurzweil basically makes 2 critical mistakes: 1) he underestimated the degree to which all those fancy products of modern capitalism are created n

I think that kurzweil basically makes 2 critical mistakes: 1) he underestimated the degree to which all those fancy products of modern capitalism are created not by machines making machines but by the nimble fingers of vast numbers of very poorly paid people- as it must be, because the maintenance on the machines to do the same work would be more expensive than just paying humans to do it. But from kurzweil’s point of view as a wealthy westerner, that fact is invisible, as it’s designed to be- the products simply appear to come out of a black box which we are not supposed to look inside of. 2) Technological progress has undergone a sort of phase transition in the last 100 years or so, with the discovery for the first- and only- time of fundamental facts about nature like electricity, thermodynamics, how human biology works, and so forth- discoveries that can only be made once. An s-curve looks like an exponential, for a while.